Pub Tour – We did it!

Sun 18 Aug 2013

Yes, in the words of Jason Mraz, “We bleeping did it!”. On Friday we met our Pub Tour crowdfunding target with a whole 3 days to spare! Thanks to everyone who supported the campaign, you are all fantastic, we’re VERY excited that the tour will now be going ahead. We’re going to be announcing all the details tomorrow morning and will also be putting all the dates on sale. Book early to get our bargain £5 Mega Mega Advance and £8 Mega Advance tickets.

So you can get your diaries primed here are outline details of the dates – full info tomorrow.

Back in your boozer. The Pub Tour returns.

Fri 19 Jul 2013

We’re very excited to announce that The Night Shift Pub Tour is (hopefully) back!

Our first pub tour, last year, was a massive success. We played in 5 packed pubs across London, bringing Purcell, Pints and Pork scratchings to your local. Over 1000 of you came, and we had amazing feedback and some great press attention as well. Even Jude Law came – result!

Now we’re planning our next tour, with a few twists to make it just a little bit different – we’ll release further details later on today.

Last time around, over 50 of you donated amounts large and small to make the tour happen, and that’s why we say ‘hopefully’ above – we need your support again to make this latest tour happen.

This afternoon, as well as releasing information on the tour, we’ll be giving you details of a new crowdfunding campaign. We need to raise £1,500 in just 30 days to make the tour happen. Unfortunately, even if we sell every single ticket we’ll still make a loss – so your crowdfunding support really does count! In return we can offer some fantastic ‘thank yous’, ranging from some tweet love through to your own private Night Shift event, plus of course our popular ‘group hug’ option…

So, keep your eyes on our website, Facebook Page and Twitter feed and we’ll be back later on today with more details on how you can help make our next Night Shift tour a reality.

Pub Tour: The Debrief

Thu 22 Mar 2012

Well, the pub tour finished about a month ago and this blog should have been written a lot sooner. But we’ve been pretty busy with other Night Shift gigs at the Roundhouse and Southbank and with other OAE events. So it’s a bit late. Sorry.

Anyway, I thought it’d be good to just to reflect a bit on the pub tour. It was all a bit of a whirlwind at the time, and we were caught out with just how much interest it would stir up – we struggled to keep up with all the press enquiries at one stage! Almost 700 of you (including, of course, Jude Law) joined us on the tour, with 4 of the 5 nights totally selling out – way beyond our expectations.

We’ve learnt a lot from the tour. One thing was how important the size and shape of the venue is – big square rooms are fantastic, long thin ones less so, as the people at the back are a long way away! We would probably be a bit more cautious with audience sizes next time – we know some of the venues were a bit TOO full for comfort. Lastly we know NEVER to programme two consecutive nights again – way too tiring for all concerned…

Most of all though we learnt how much everyone (audience and musicians) enjoyed the night, there was such a great atmosphere at the gigs. And we really do mean that about the musicians. You can read what violinist Maggie Faultless made of playing pubs on her Guardian blog.

What next?

Well, firstly we’d welcome all your thoughts and ideas. What could we do to improve the events next time? Any other composers you’d like to hear? Any new venues we should try out? That includes pubs outside of London!

Second, there will definitely be more pub events. (After the last gig I know my immediate reaction was ‘Let’s do it all again!’) So there’ll be some one-offs in the next 6 months or so, and hopefully another tour in the future, probably next year.

Finally we want to say a last and VERY BIG thank you to all the crowdfunders who helped make the tour happen by contributing towards it. You made it possible, and importantly, through your donations, kept ticket prices down so that everyone could enjoy it.

Thanks again for your support and keep your eyes peeled for more events coming your way soon!

We did it!

Wed 26 Oct 2011

As you may have seen, over the past month we have been busy raising funds to put on a whole tour of Night Shift’s in pubs, following on from the success of our initial event in September. Well, we had a flood of donations in the closing days of the campaign and were thrilled not just to meet our target, but to smash through it with £1,255 raised overall. We were thrilled with everyone’s generosity and enthusiasm, and with over 50 donors it really did prove the concept of Crowdfunding – a lot of small donations making a BIG difference. Thank you!

So we’re now proceeding with planning the tour, pinning down dates with musicians and scoping out pubs. We’d love to hear from you with any venue suggestions. We’re looking for pubs that have a space suitable for live music and which can hold 150+ people. If you have any ideas then drop us a line. We hope to announce dates and venues in early 2012, if not before.

Just three days left to help us…

Wed 19 Oct 2011

There’s only a few days left to help us reach our £1200 goal, letting us take our Night Shift gigs to London pubs all over the capital.

We’re so grateful to everyone who’s donated already and we’re nearly there…but even with a sell-out crowd, each event loses a little money, once the musicians, DJ, room hire and publicity have all been paid for – so we need YOUR help to make up the difference and to make them happen.

We’ve got £400 left to raise- if just 80 people gave a fiver, we’d reach our target! In return, there’s loads of thank you’s up for grabs, including a pint with the players, a VIP package at a future event or even a group hug from the office team.

So if you’re feeling generous, please do spare a few pounds to help us make this great project possible.

Future events

Wed 5 Oct 2011

There’ll be a post soon with news and pics from our last event on 29 September, but in the meantime we’re *very* aware that our ‘what’s on’ section is empty! Well, that doesn’t mean that there are no more Night Shift’s, far from it. Expect some exciting annoucements later this month about 2012 events, and of course, we still want to do that pub tour. If you want to help us make it happen visit our crowdfunding page here.

If you want a gig in a pub…give us a hug

Fri 23 Sep 2011

If you’ve been following our Night Shift page on Facebook or our Twitterfeed you might have seen some odd pictures posted in recent days…the office giving each other a hug (repeated here for your viewing pleasure), pork scratchings, a pint, a bunch of postcards…

Well we can finally reveal what it’s all about. As you may have read on here, or perhaps you were there, earlier this month we put on a Night Shift event in a pub in King’s Cross. It was a great evening, and it seems that performers and audience enjoyed it equally.

So we’d like to do more. 5 more in fact. The idea is to do a tour of London pubs in February next year, taking in all corners of London. But, there’s a problem. As with almost every other event we do, ticket sales don’t cover costs, even with a sell-out. So we’re embarking on a fundraising campaign with a difference to make up the shortfall.

We’re doing something called crowdfunding. This is a quite new form of fundraising – all done online and based on the principle that a lot of people donating small amounts can make a big difference. We’ve partnered with Crowdfunding site wedidthis and have 30 days to raise the £1,200 required.

But it’s not all about take take take. A key part of crowdfunding is giving you, our funders (we hope!) the chance to get something back too. So, depending on your donation we have a whole raft of interesting thank yous lined up. For example, give us a fiver and we’ll say thanks on Facebook and Twitter. A tenner gets you a postcard sent to you from an OAE tour. £50 buys you a group hug from the office.

Yes, really.

There’s some more background about the campaign on the video below, including footage from our ‘pilot’ pub gig.

So, if you’d like to make our pub tour happen please visit our campaign page. Any donation, large or small, is useful. We have just 30 days to raise the money and if we don’t meet the target we get nothing at all. No pressure.

Thanks for reading, and a final, very unBritish plea: Get your credit card out and get crowdfunding!